Napster Creator Wonders What All The Fuss Is About

April 10, 2000|By Steve Knopper. Special to the Tribune.

A few weeks ago, Shawn Fanning returned to Northeastern University, in Boston, where he had dropped out last summer. At first, nobody recognized him. Then his old roommates began telling people what he did for a living. Suddenly, he drew crowds.

"The guy who invented Napster," was the phrase his roommates used. "I had to force them to stop introducing me that way," Fanning says. "Everybody seemed to have used (Napster) and knew what it was."

Fanning, 19, is one of those instant Internet celebrities you wouldn't recognize if you stood next to him in an elevator. In a phone interview from his San Mateo, Calif., office, he sounds like he can't understand why anybody would be interested in him. "I'm surprised Napster hasn't outgrown me yet," he says. "It's a huge idea and I don't have much experience."

Napster, the program Fanning designed after reading a book to learn the code, is an amazingly simple idea. It's basically a giant chat room for people who download music files. Log on, enter the "rock folder," and several other computer users' music collections appear on screen. Click on No Doubt's "Just a Girl," say, and the song beams directly to your hard drive. Whoever else is in the room can download from your collection too. This is far more efficient than endless

This is far more efficient than endless Web-surfing to find the music you want.

College students love Napster. Many, using high-speed, university-dorm-room connections, set the software to "download," then head to class. Upon their return--presto! Free, spanking-new songs, ready to play.

But college administrators aren't Napster fans. Because the software sucks up large chunks of campus bandwidth, more than 200 university administrations have blocked students from visiting the Napster Web site (www.napster.com). Some students responded by petitioning for their Napster rights. (At Indiana University, where students petitioned, access to the site was recently restored.)

Such activity has made Fanning a cause celebre on campuses and in Silicon Valley.

But he isn't the cause-celebre type.

Invariably, he is photographed in a T-shirt and University of Michigan baseball cap with the rim bent just so over his short dark hair. . Though Spin documented Fanning's taste for Mazda RX-7s, the most colorful personal anecdote the music magazine could find was his re-purchasing the Led Zeppelin CD box set after he had left it behind in Boston.

Fanning says he used to party all the time in college, which is part of the reason he dropped out: "I wasn't learning much." But even over the phone, he doesn't sound like the partying type. "I tend to be a fairly shy person," he says. "The press is really overwhelming. It was difficult for me to get used to that. I've heard people comparing [Napster] to the advent of the World Wide Web. In some respects I believe them, but at the same time it seems a bit dramatic to me."

But the word dramatic accurately describes the record industry's response to Napster. Because the Recording Industry Association of America equates free on-line music with piracy, the powerful organization sued Fanning's company last fall. According to the RIAA's Web site, Napster "enables and facilitates piracy of music on an unprecedented scale."

Some artists, such as Chuck D of the rap group Public Enemy, love Napster and the free digital music files known as MP3s for precisely the same reason record companies hate them. Chuck encourages artists to sell music directly to their fans, thus eliminating the need for record companies entirely. If record companies continue to resist the MP3 revolution, he says, they'll become obsolete.

But not all artists are in love with on-line music trading, especially the kind that nets them nothing for their work. In "Artists to Napster: Drop Dead!" a Salon on-line magazine story in March, musicians Aimee Mann, Jonatha Brooke and the Black Crowes complained Napster was killing their livelihood.

Fanning refuses to jump into the public debate about Napster. He won't answer questions about the future of music distribution, or respond to the music industry's complaints, "because they somewhat tie into the lawsuit," he says. But he's willing to discuss just about anything else.

"Generally when I mention it people say, `I like the idea.' A lot of times, the legal discussions will come out and people will debate the issues. Some people are just interested in asking technical questions," he says. "And some people just think I'm lying--`You didn't really create that.' That's usually really funny."

Fanning first touched a computer 3 years ago, at his uncle's house in Boston. They played chess. He began programming a year later and liked it so much that he majored in computer science at Northeastern.